Skin

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

The Angry Buddhist A Novel Seth Greenland Europa Editions: 400 pp., $16 paper Seth Greenland's "The Angry Buddhist" begins with two sexy American women getting matching tattoos in Puerto Vallarta - and then it swiftly jumps forward into the madcap final week of a congressional race out in the desert around Palm Springs. The incumbent, a wily and infinitely pragmatic political sleazebag named Randall Duke, finds himself facing a new kind of problem, namely, an opponent who might actually defeat him. Her name is Mary Swain, and here she is, observed at a rally by the angry Buddhist of the title, one of Randall's brothers, the busted cop called Jimmy Ray Duke: "She glides to the microphone and Jimmy notes the burnished skin, the blinding smile, the five hundred dollars' worth of blond highlights, fitted red blouse set off against the matching white linen skin and jacket that wraps her like cellophane.

Imagine having the fountain of youth as close at hand as the bathroom. We're not there yet — but there's a burgeoning number of at-home, high-tech beauty gadgets that claim to smooth wrinkles, whiten teeth and remove hair without the need to invest in pricey beauty treatments at the spa, dermatologist or plastic surgeon's office. Some of these gadgets are so high-tech the Food and Drug Administration considers them medical devices, so approach the world of cosmetic gadgetry with caution.

It's never been easier to feel like a natural woman. The 1960s mantra about getting ourselves back to the garden now applies to an increasing number of beauty products, with some small companies literally going to the garden and farm to bring customers fresh, natural, pure and organic ingredients in their hair- and skin-care items. These products provide an alternative to more mainstream offerings, which over the last half-century have become increasingly laden with synthetics that some would rather avoid.

For many Southern Californians, summer is the season for beaches, chaise longues and the quest for the perfect tan. Not for Margaret Qiu. She and thousands of other Asian American women are going to great lengths to avoid the sun -- fighting to preserve or enhance their pale complexions with expensive creams, masks, gloves, professional face scrubs and medical procedures.

When it comes to sunscreens, most consumers are concerned about SPF, brand and price. Typically, they do not turn the bottles around to check out what, exactly, they are slathering on their skin, maybe because they'd be confronted with words such as avobenzone, oxybenzone, octisalate, diethylexyl, triethanolamine and a host of other ingredients unpronounceable to anyone who works outside a lab. It's easy to see why some consumers are turning to...

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Schneider, the doyenne of produce writers, called for "a cucumber revolution" in her definitive book, "Vegetables From Amaranth to Zucchini" . Denouncing the standard American slicing varieties, she implored, "Refuse to buy pumped-up, tasteless, seedy blimps with greasy, thick, nasty skin masquerading as cucumbers!" Around the United States, coarse, watery commercial varieties still predominate, but they have largely been displaced at Southern California farmers markets by wondrous Persian cucumbers.

A biological Jell-O with a structure as precise as a microchip's could someday be the surgeon's patch to seal large, deep wounds and help them regrow skin. Using techniques borrowed from silicon chip design, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., created a network of channels in soft sheets of collagen, a main component of skin. Body cells fill those channels with blood vessels — and that crucial blood supply, in turn, coaxes skin to regrow. This tissue template, described online May 6 in the journal Biomaterials, works well in mice.

When doctors, researchers and celebrity lobbyists talk about the amazing potential of stem cell therapy, their discussions usually center on big-ticket items such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer and spinal cord injuries. They don't, as a rule, talk about wrinkles and crow's feet. But could stem cells be the next frontier in anti-aging medicine? Though most stem cell therapies are still in their infancy, a small number of plastic surgeons across the country are already offering so-called stem cell face-lifts, cosmetic procedures that use a person's own stem cells to supposedly bring new life to aging, sagging skin.

Yes, you read that right. A Chinese man had to have an eel surgically removed from his bladder after a mishap while undergoing an unusual spa treatment. Zhang Nan, a 56-year-old resident of Hubei province, was bathing with live eels, in the hopes that the tiny, serpentine critters would nibble away layers of dead skin, revealing more youthful-looking skin below. It's similar to those unusual pedicures that have fish eat dead skin off people's feet -- except that you're fully submerged, and you're probably naked, and there are eels all over you. Anyway, Nan felt a sharp pain, realized a 6-inch eel had entered his penis and was wriggling up through his urethra.

Please don't take this wrong. You look absolutely fine the way you are. It's just that ... well, with a little work, you might look even better. We're not talking plastic surgery. Just the daily grind of buckling down and trying to eat better. Fresh from the March issue of the journal PLoS ONE comes word that scarfing down a few extra fruits and vegetables - yes, those again - could give you a significant leg up in the attractiveness department. Scientists have known for a while that the same pigments that give fruits and vegetables their color - carotenoids - can accumulate in your skin and give it color too. What they didn't know was this: How many fruits and vegetables do you have to eat for how long in order for people to notice the difference in your coloring?

Salt-roasted salmon Total time: 20 minutes Servings: 4 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, plus additional for serving 1 1/2 pounds salmon filet (1¼ to 1½-inch thick) center cut, skin on, cut into 4 equal pieces 8 large eggs, whites only About 4 cups kosher salt 1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a medium ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the salmon, skin-side down, and cook until the skin begins to crisp, 2 to 3 minutes.

For millenniums, human beings have been ingenious in putting tree bark to a range of uses — as canoe coverings, containers, cork bottle-stops and even clothing. Among cultures that still make barkcloth, two have become well known: the Mbuti of the Ituri rain forest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Ömie of Mount Lamington in Papua New Guinea, although these days they wear it mostly at ceremonial occasions. "Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth From New Guinea and Central Africa," an exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA (through Aug. 26)

It's an outrage even if you look past race - even if Florida vigilante George Zimmerman does claim a Latino mother and a few black friends. Zimmerman's ethnicity can't excuse the killing of Trayvon Martin . And it doesn't obliterate the racial slur that Zimmerman muttered on the 911 tape as he chased down the black teenager. The case has roiled the Orlando, Fla., suburb where Trayvon was shot to death last month by Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch leader who became alarmed when he spotted Trayvon walking through the gated condominium complex that Zimmerman spent aimless days and nights patrolling.

New Mexico was planning to celebrate its statehood centennial by inviting tourists to come experience the state's rich culture, take in its extraordinary views and have epic outdoor adventures. But the Land of Enchantment's promotion hit a snag, raising questions about who exactly is being represented in the celebration -- and reviving  historical insecurities. It all started when the New Mexico Department of Tourism began planning  a $2-million marketing campaign to attract outsiders to the state, which  had observed its statehood centennial Jan. 6. The department had learned that the state ranked 38th in a poll ranking tourists' preferred destinations -- and wanted to do something about that.

Nokia is taking steps to make sure you never miss another phone call, text or email alert again: The company has filed a patent for a tattoo that would send "a perceivable impulse" to your skin whenever someone tried to contact you on the phone. Talk about letting technology get under your skin! According to the patent filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the phone would communicate with the tattoo through magnetic waves. The phone would emit magnetic waves and the tattoo would act as a receiver.

Tretinoin, a chemical cousin of Vitamin A and the active ingredient in the anti-acne cream Retin-A, can dramatically fade liver spots, according to new research reported last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Tretinoin, sold under the brand name Retin-A by Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp., has also been used to treat warts and sun-damaged skin. Sales of the drug skyrocketed in 1988 after a University of Michigan team reported that it helped smooth wrinkles.

It's 1 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and Heidi Kling is reading in an all-white room. She's shoeless, but socks protect her feet from the 6 inches of salt that cake the floor. The only objects in the windowless room are four chaise longues and hand-molded plaster icicles that hang from the ceiling. If there were a Yeti in the room, you would swear you were on the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Normally, Kling would be at work or running errands, but today her allergies, which cause her ears to ring, have brought her to this monochrome sanctuary.

When the phone rang about a year ago, with a query about whether she would consider playing Sarah Palin in a TV movie, Julianne Moore jumped at the chance. "Then I hung up the phone and thought, 'Oh my God, what have I done?'" Moore recalled recently with a laugh. "To play a historical figure is one thing. To play a living historical figure deepens the challenge. But to play a culturally significant, very prominent, living figure, that kind of put it over the top. " Over the top could also describe early reaction to Moore's performance and to "Game Change," HBO's docudrama on Palin's mesmerizing 2008 run for the vice presidency.

It can be swallowed, injected, inhaled or delivered to the bloodstream through a time-release implant. Now scientists say they have devised a new way to give patients their medicine: through a fingertip-size microchip embedded in the body that doctors can control remotely via a wireless connection. The drug chip, more than a dozen years in the making, was used to deliver bone-strengthening hormones to women with advanced osteoporosis who otherwise would have needed daily injections.